The merchandising of newspapers through vending machines has developed through many and varied apparatuses from the time when in U.S. Pat. No. 601,189 Welch referred to a newspaper vendor that accepted one or more pennies until today when at least one of our larger publishers is selling one of its editions for one or more dollars. To further complicate matters, nearly all publishers today charge more for at least one of their week-end editions than they do for their daily editions.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,760,924 Voegeli and 3,884,330 Chalabian both teach the use of vertical coin slots with sensing pawls to release the access door of a newspaper vendor. With a small number of like coins or even with simple combinations of coins these vendors have, in the past, been proven quite satisfactory. Both the aforementioned have provided within the coin mechanism a means for making said mechanism responsive to a first and then a second price. U.S. Pat. No. 4,093,058 Terry, while being substantially the same, teaches an improvement in the use of a remote lock to select between the first and then a second price, thus making it possible for a service person to change the price without having access to the coins which have collected within the vendor.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,779 Pearson and 4,037,701 Knickerbocker are still further improvements in that both teach the use of a totalizer, which will accept any combination of coins up to a predetermined price, to control an access door with Knickerbocker teaching the use of a remote lock in the same manner as the heretofore mentioned Terry. Both Pearson and Knickerbocker teach the use of a single price cam and relatively complex resetting apparatus.